"Respect Mother Earth and her giving ways or trade away our children's days"
~ Neil Young
"strange how the night moves
with autumn closing in" ~ Bob Seeger
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Snip It Good!
Organic Fall Gardening Methods and Techniques
A heavy frost has laid itself down on your garden bed. The leaves have wilted and turned color. Now before you go off to cover you gardens with a warm blanket of hay, you may find yourself wondering exactly what to cut back and what to leave standing in the garden. The Minnesota wintertime landscape can be a bit stark. Usually by December most of what we see is covered in snow. At this point of the year, since your landscape is essentially a field of white it can be aesthetically important to have some texture in the garden to break up the white monotony. Choose what to cut back in your garden based first on whether the plant in question will stand tall enough to catch snow and look pretty in the winter. Any herbaceous* perennial that stands shorter than about 12 inches is probably not going to be seen over the accumulated winter snow. Many of these shorter plants end up a soggy brown mush in the spring, and so it will just be easier to cut them back in the fall. Hostas are in this category. It can be challenging to make a garden bed look tidy in the spring with squishy rotted hosta leaves all over it. I like to leave standing, coneflower, persicaria, astilbe, mullien, milkweeds, and most grasses. Any tall plant that will catch some snow and cause a little texture to pop out of the white winter garden should be left to stand proud. Be careful! There are a couple of common mistakes to avoid while performing cutbacks. First, there are a few plants that are deceptively evergreen. The first fall that I worked in gardens, I got myself into a bit of trouble with “the boss” for cutting yucca back. Yucca, hens and chicks, pachysandra, and some low sedum are all types of evergreens that at a glance appear as though they may be herbaceous. Some plants, such as St. Johns wort and Russian sage can be thought of as being categorized somewhere between an herbaceous plant and a shrub. These plants have partially woody stems. Plants like these will not fully die back to the ground, and if left standing they will sprout greenery in the spring from the dormant soft wood of their stems. Perhaps worse than cutting back an evergreen plant, would be cutting into the green thumb of a gardener. God know's I've gawked at many a galling gory gash gouged in good gardeners gloves after gripping greenery for grafting without regard or guidance. That is to say, please don’t cut your fingers.When a hard frost comes along you must snip it. When there’s dead leaves in your palm you must snip it. Unless of course it looks good through the winter, then wait till spring and snip it into shape! Let the evergreens alone, and for goodness sake, snip the gardens, not the gardener! It’s not to late to snip it. Snip it good**. *Herbaceous: A plant that does not have a woody stem, and dies back to the ground every year.
**Snip it good: An explanation for all those who are too young, too old, or for those like me whose parents didn’t let you listen to rock music in 1980. This is a play on the 80’s new wave song called Whip it. Thank you Devo!
The Seed Vol. 8 Oct. 20, 2007 A Giving Tree Gardens Newsletter
Photos and Text by Russ Henry
©2007 by Giving Tree Gardens, all rights reserved.
Giving Tree Gardens in the Co-op news!!!!!
" Never Let the weeds grow higher then the garden, always keep a saphire in your mind".
~ Tom Waits
Hay! It’s time for the garden to go to bed!
Hay is not just for horses anymore! The leaves are falling off the trees, and once the frost has bitten the green out of the garden it’s time to put it to bed! Be sure to use hay and not straw! If you cover your garden with straw this fall, by next summer you will be a straw farmer! So stick with hay, OKAY!
This grass called Panicum 'Northwind' will look great with a little snow on it's blooms. Leave your blooming grasses up throughout the winter.
The hay you will need for covering is sometimes called marsh hay, or lowland hay. We don't want staw, so just make sure it's hay and you'll be okay!
Plant Profile:
Aster
"dead leaves on the dirty ground
when I know you're not around"
~ Jack White
Are You A Curious Gardener?? Do you have a stubborn garden question that just won't go away? Send it to us and we'll see if our garden gurus can divine an answer! Click here to email your persistent question. You may even see your question answered in next months issue of The Seed!!!!
Yet another variety out of a veritable smorgasboard of aster choices.
This late bloomer is named after the greek word 'astron' which means star. With bright star shaped blooms of white, blue, pink purple, and yellow from the end of September to the begining of November the reason for this plants cosmic name is apparent. Every gardener needs to plan for a full year of blooms, and asters are a great tool for gardeners to extend their bloom season.
Don't let the snow weigh you down! Giving Tree Gardens now offers SNOW REMOVAL SERVICE! Let our bio-diesel burning truck clear your driveway right after we hand shovel your walk! Click here to schedule your free consultation!
You gotta get behind the mule in the morning and plow ~Tom Waits
DO YOU NEED TO GET OUT AND HAVE A GOOD TIME WITH SOME DOWN TO EARTH FOLKS ???
LET'S PARTY!!!
We're so happy about the new garden we've made at the Susan Hensel Design Gallery, that we're throwing a party, and you're invited!
Want some help with that?
But WHY COVER the gardens???
I thought you’d ask such a question, and so I’ve come up with a few “convenient” answers.
- Because a professional organic gardener said so.
- Oh, you need better reasons.
- Well how about how it helps protect against the drying wind and sun in the winter!
Use much lotion last winter? It’s dry like a desert in Minnesota in the wintertime. Even though the ground is frozen we experience dry air, sun, and wind that work together to transpire water out of the ground. Tucking your garden bed in with a thick blanket of hay will help keep moisture around the roots of your plants. If roots become too dry in the winter the plants will be harmed or dead by spring, and we don’t want that to happen now do we?
But how do I cover my garden with hay??? You’re asking now. Well I guess I’ll just have to explain everything! The golden rules for spreading hay are as follows.
If your hay is golden, then it’s not hay. It’s straw. Go get hay. Hay is kind of green, blue, and brown all at the same time. Hay also tends to have more flatness to it, whereas straw is tube shaped. OHH! So that’s where they got the name for that little plastic devise in my lemonade!
As with most any situation life presents, when in doubt, lay it on thick! Cut open the bale of hay and start messing it up (this is the fun part). As you mess it all up and unpack what seems like a grassy layer cake you will discover that you can fluff the hay up or leave it in thick slices. I do a bit of both. Where the plants are young or tender I will lay down some of the thick slices of the hay bale. Where the plants are more established, protected, or hardy I will fluff the hay up and lay it out a little less thick.
Put a clamp on it! Use a little netting if you need to hold your hay down so it doesn’t blow away. Usually I just get it all very wet. As it’s freezing at night when I cover the gardens the water I give it now will not only freeze the hay into place, but it will also provide one last chance for the soil to soak up some moisture before winter.
It’s bedtime! Are you still up? Well just remember to ask for hay at the garden store, lay it on thick, and then clamp it down. Tuck those tender perennials in tight and know all winter long that your garden bed is dreaming of spring.
This amaranth took all season to produce blooms, but these blooms will look great all winter long.
Golden straw on the left next to a brownish bale of hay on the right.
As Tom Waits might say straw is "harder to get rid of than tatoos", so please be sure to use hay for winter cover.
